Cloud could cut $12 billion from US government annual deficit: study

It was less than two years ago the federal government began egging on its agencies to adopt a “Cloud-First” rule to IT procurement and “Shared-First” initiative to pare down its $80-billion-a-year budget. It appears that efforts to replace on-premises systems with cloud services are actually bearing fruit, at least one study shows. The study goes even further — if agencies really got aggressive about cloud, they could shave $12 billion off the annual IT tab. That amount almost covers NASA’s entire annual budget.

A federal IT consortium now estimates that federal agencies are now already saving about $5.5 billion annually with their cloud implementations, but that’s only part of the story. It’s likely that this savings will rise to $12 billion as cloud efforts move forward.

That’s the call from MeriTalk Cloud Computing Exchange (CCX), a community of Federal cloud leaders. The rosy savings numbers come from a newly released survey of 108 federal IT managers that extrapolates the cloud numbers from reported savings. On average, the IT executives report a savings so far of at least 7% off their IT budgets for the next fiscal year. Based on the 2013 IT budget of $78.9 billion, that’s about $5.5 billion in annual Federal savings, the study concludes.

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